The Art of Pixel Performers

scriptedfun writes "The BBC features the growing role of computer graphics in movies, but points out that it is still the human actors behind the CG characters which make them alive. From the article: 'It seems that the performance artist can still bring something to a performance, which [ a CG ] artist cannot.'"

Comments

Yes but the actors will get peanuts

[MarkByers]

It seems that the performance artist can still bring something to a performance, which [ a CG ] artist cannot.'"

I'm probably going to get modded as troll again but never mind!

A Hollywood actor can get $zillions because everyone recognises their face. Few people will recognise an actor from behind the CG mask. Actors for computer generated will be easily replacable and probably not earn anything like their Hollywood counterparts. In fact the computer generated character will probably be worth more money than the actor that played their part behind the scenes.

Voices though... that's a different story.

Re:Yes but the actors will get peanuts

[aymanh]

I don't remember if I read the following somewhere, or just thought of it while reading your post:

A CG artist creates an exceptional 3D character and manages to attract enough movie producer attention to create a movie for their character, the artist keeps the right of using the character instead of giving it away to the producer (in return of offering their exceptional character to appear in the movie), the artist then may build popularity and demand for their character, and attract more movie producers, slowly achieving the success of real-life actors.

With CG movies becoming more common, is this scenario possible? I know it's easier said than done, and my knowledge on movie production is shallow, but I wonder if there is anything that stops this from working for CG artists.

The hard part may be keeping the character usage right, this is where the difference between CG artists and real-life actors lies, but with a character interesting enough, is it possible?

Re:Oh yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

It is unfortunate that many animated movies (CG or otherwise) use celebrity actors rather than professional voice actors. There are many talented professional voice actors and they do not get the roles because their names do not draw people to the box office - even though their performances would likely be superior to that of celebrity actors.

True

[Tx]

it is still the human actors behind the CG characters [CC] which make them alive.

Only a human could make Jar Jar so f*#king annoying!

Larry The Cable Guy is not actually a tow truck.

[ScentCone]

I don't know about everyone else, but I thought that most dazzling and endearing scene in the new Pixar movie was when Tow Mater went backwards at high speeds through dusky, misty, wooded landscape with his hazard lights twirling. The voice actor (Larry, the proverbial "cable guy" comic) was mostly contributing things like, "woo hoo!" Otherwise, that bit of manic choreography didn't involve any actor motion capture - it was completely, crazily synthesized out of untold hundreds of hours of desktop work.

Knowing Pixar's people, they were probably playing with toy trucks or watching video of kids scateboarding, or something... but the magic, comedy, and sweetness of that scene was entirely visual and not about the actor(s), per se - though the cast vocalizations and great foley work certainly added to the atmosphere.

Nothing new.

[Eightyford]

Motion capture is nothing new. The real credit should still be given to the animators.

Re:Nothing new.

[Goeland86]

Motion capture isn't new, that is a fact. However, it's still the most used technology for CG animation of big projects mostly because it's the cheapest way of achieving realistic results.
Quality animators are hard to find in the CG market, thus they cost more, and they take more time to get the same realism into movements, it's a fact, and it will remain so for a while.
That's why the article says that the actors animating those CG chars are the ones who deserve the props.
Also, there will always be some sort of animation on top of the captured data, to adapt the human actor's movements to the CG character's body, mostly when there's size difference (imagine a 6 foot actor animating for a 4 foot CG char).
So really it's teamwork, but the actors still give life in a way CG animators need to catch up to.

No kidding!

[Wellington Grey]

That Andy Serkis didn't get nominated for best supporting actor speaks to how out of touch the accademy awards are.

-Grey

Re:No kidding!

[glwtta]

how out of touch the accademy awards are

It could also speak to how they don't live in their parents' basements.

Re:Question: What is the difference in pay?

[MarkByers]

Actors almost have to take a pay cut to be the voice because 3d movies are EXpENSIVE TO MAKE.

Wrong, sorry! You don't take a pay cut because the thing you are working on is expensive to make! Did the Titanic actors have to take a pay cut because the film was so expensive to make? No!

You take a pay cut because you are easily replacable by someone capable of filling your spot equally well and willing to work for less. And the further you are from your audience, the harder it is to make yourself irreplacable.

You are probably still going to get modded up and I will get modded Troll though, because this is Slashdot after all, and people here seem to like dreaming that the world is different from how it is!

Cartoons and pixels

[Henry V .009]

John Kricfalusi, creator of Ren and Stimpy, keeps an awesome blog that deals with this topic from time to time. I think that he'd suggest that artistic craft and technique can add a whole lot of reality to the performances of cartoon criters. The golden age of all this stuff, 1930s and 1940s Warner Bros, demonstrates that the state of the art can get pretty high.

Re:Larry The Cable Guy is not actually a tow truck

[posterlogo]

I think you're absolutely right -- just because a lot of CG characters are modeled directly from human actor footage, it does not mean that the state of the art is at a stand still. Companies like pixar are taking it to new levels as far as fully-imagined characters from scratch. Note, however, that all their best characters are non-human: toys, bugs, fish, monsters, cars (even the incredibles are comic-book stylized). It is simply too unconvincing when they try to modal humans from scratch. However, I'm not sure there will be that many technological leaps required to achieve a convincing effect -- it is party also a matter of psychology. We are ingrained from birth to recognize and characterize other humans, so essentially, we're a very tough audience. But some subtle changes in modeling -- more grime, more wrinkles, more blemishes, will help humanize the CG characters.

So a voice talent ISN'T an actor?

[mix4pix]

This is so lame that I just have to comment on it.

The BBC article says: "So are we moving towards a time when we can get rid of human actors and just use voice artists and computer generated characters? [Visual effects supervisor] Joe Letteri says: "I don't think so. That was the lesson we learnt on Gollum. Andy Serkis was brought in just to be the voice, but what worked really well was that you had an actor there present in the scene doing all of this."

Hmmm . . . "Get rid of human actors and JUST use voice artists"?? Oh, so I guess this Joe Letteri assumes a voice talent ISN'T an actor? Or human, for that matter? Gee, thanks.

Voice artists ARE actors. Acting is just as much about the voice and the way lines are delivered as it is anything physical. If it wasn't, we would just cast models and stunt people in all our live-action films.

Nope, acting requires a voice. That's why it's called an "audition": acting is an auditory medium.

I think it's difficult to pick apart voice and physical action. You can't really have one without the other. Anyone who has seen a decent voice talent at work in the recording booth can see that they're acting using their whole body. The guy who plays Homer Simpson goes nuts inside there. He's an actor all right. The body backs up the voice.

And if voice were only a small part of what makes a good actor, then Julia Roberts and Morgan Freeman would never be doing any voiceover work. (They do lots.)

A visual effects supervisor who brings in someone not to act the part, but "just to be the voice," clearly lacks the understand that "being a voice" IS acting.

The Uncanny Valley

[evilsofa]

That "something" is natural movement which doesn't trigger the Uncanny Valley reaction in viewers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

I disagree.

[tinrobot]

As an animtor, I may be biased, but I have to take exception with the basic premise of the article. Motion capture still has a lot of problems. Not that I'm against mocap, it's great for making Tiger Woods swing the golf club like Tiger Woods in his latest game, and it's terrific for other types of realistic human motion.

But when it comes to acting, there is nothing to replace the frame by frame attention that an animator can give to a scene. Polar Express proved that humans acting using mocap still look like humans wearing rubber masks. Gollum in LOTR was a good exception, yet the basic mocap of Andy Serkis was gone over by real animators who could use their knowledge and skill to truly bring the character to life.

There's also the issue of character design. If you mocap a real human and put that data on something that isn't really human, you lose a lot. The musculature of a human face might not quite match up to that reptillian monster (or whatever) and the result will appear soft and lifeless. If the body geometry is different, you might be able to compensate in software, but the underlying motion will still be that of a human. If you mocapped a human and put in on Godzilla, you'd have what looks like a human in a Godzilla suit (which may actually be a good thing if you're doing an homage to the old Japanese films)

Mocap is cool, and I'm sure Tom Hanks loved putting on that nifty mocap suit... but the best acting on CG characters today is still the result of animators working one frame at a time

This BBC writer can't even speak English!

[SysKoll]

The lame content of the article is not helped by its bad grammar. TFA says: Certainly mother nature has always been difficult to recreate. Fire and water are so infinitesimally complicated to model that animators can only create rough approximations on screen.

Last time I checked, "infinitesimal" meant "extremely small, negligeable", which is the exact opposite of the notion the writer has in mind (that is, that water is hard to animate).

And it went right through the BBC editors, who are apparenlty easily dazzled by latinate words,

Poor Beeb.

I suggest that the author of the article, Spencer Kelly, should be replaced by a random tech news generator.

Re:Oh yeah

[Ucklak]

I'll take Frank Welker over Tom Hanks any day.

In case you're too lazy to folow the link or read through the 518 entries he has, some of his notable characters:

Fred from Scooby Doo - and now that Messick has passed away, Scooby Doo as well.
Boo Boo Bear from yogi Bear
Jabberjaw
Dynomutt
All the other Gremlins and Mogwai that weren't Gizmo/Howie Mandel
The following Transformers Blades/Buzzsaw/Chromedome/Frenzy/Galvatron/Groove/ Laserbeak/Megatron/Mirage/Mixmaster/Ratbat/Ravage/ Rumble/Skywarp/Sludge/Soundwave/Steeljaw/Superion
Abu the Monkey from Aladdin
Curious George ...and I'm sure there are plenty more that mey strike a chord.

Re:Larry The Cable Guy is not actually a tow truck

[LocoMan]

The main difference between Pixar (from what I've read around) is that most companies get the famous actors first and build the characters around them (see Shark Tale), while Pixar seems to go the other way around, they set the character and personality first, and then they start looking for an actor whose voice would fit the character.

Re:Oh yeah

[orasio]

That really shows.
I live in a Spanish-speaking country, and here we can watch them subtitled, or spoken in spanish.
Some time ago, it was a no-brainer, subtitled pictures were much better.
Recently, it does really notice that proffesional voice actors are much better than tv/cinema stars at doubling CG characters.
I like Elen Degeneres, but Dori (?), her character in Nemo, pales in comaprison with its spanish counterpart, my friends and I keep laughing at some lines we heard in that movie (in spanish; -tortugas!!- ). Then we rented it in english, and we didn't laugh at all at the same spots, and little anywhere else.

Shrek is great in spanish, too, its played by the same guy that doubles Homer Simpson in spanish.

That shows that the guys who did the translation did a better work than the original actors, while playing with the handicap of a translated comedy script, that loses lots of lines and jokes.

Re:Larry The Cable Guy is not actually a tow truck

[AvitarX]

Correct,

Pixar actually auditions the actors while looking at 2-D sketches of the characters. The actors who make them "jump off the page" get the part.

Re:Realism

[nelsonal]

As an example take a close look at your hand. I'm sure as a child you stuck a flash light in the web between your thumb and hand and noticed the glow. Your skin color comes from a mix of light reflecting off the melanin in several layers of skin of various stages of life, blood near the surface and if you make a fist skin pulled tight over the bone. In addition, there are creases and hair. To make a good skin model you would need to account for all of these items and humans have unbelievably sophisticated IFF (systems mostly used for sexual selection) to spot any flaw in any of those items (because they might have indicated a less healthy or fertile partner). If we could model all of that, we could probably model virtual voices and Sim0ne will be an A list star.